Therlun
2922
Dunno where you live (and the regional restrictions) but did you try Civ 5 at D2D?
It’s 30 pounds which comes down to about 36€ right now, and I had no problem with the UK price checkout as a dirty, Euro-using European with good teeth.
Stelios
2923
I live in Greece. I’m not allowed to download it from D2D. It was the second place I checked.
There are several ways to improve your relationship with other civs. Religion, tech trading with the right Civs, trading resources, joining in on wars. Sure, if you’re trading with Monty’s worst enemy then there is a pretty good chance of him attacking you. The key to avoid wars is to know who to grease and how to do it, something that seems very hard in Civ 5 because it’s very hard to know what they think of you and other AIs.
jpinard
2925
Chris, you sound like you have an inside track on the game. Were you a beta-tester? One of the “Frankenstein” group?
Because if so I’d be curiuos why this didn’t come up. I will sell this game or ask for a refund if they have no plans to add the missing replay and super detailed stats after you win/lose a game. I actually, saved all my Civ IV games, 1 turn before winning, so I could see all the games and their course through history one after another. It’s magical and makes you feel like you played something that was more than a game.
Tony_M
2926
So how does the speed of the late game feel, compared to the early-mid game? I’m a huge fan of Civ 4, brilliant piece of game design. But one glaring fault in all the Civ games that Civ 4 didn’t fix is how slow and bogged down the late game gets (in terms of my time not the PC).
I’ve put hundreds of hours into Civ 1,2,4 and SMAC, but I’ve rarely finished a game. At some point I just declare myself the winner because I can’t deal with the long endgame.
BTW you don’t need to convince me to buy it, I’m just waiting for my copy from the UK. Cost of Civ 5 in Australia: In stores $80 AUD, on Steam $84 AUD, Posted from UK $38 AUD. Crazy.
Jag
2928
I’m finding the same thing happening in V. I already stopped a game when it was clear that I was way beyond anyone else. I just didn’t have the patience to wage war across an entire ocean map to wipe the rest of them out.
victrix
2929
It’s miles better. Especially if you play on Quick and don’t play on giant maps, but even on Normal, it’s still totally fine once you hit Modern.
Because you don’t need a massive army in most situations, and because less workers are needed, there’s simply less busywork overall, so you can focus more on long term strategic goals throughout the game, and less on shuffling 25323 units around the map once you hit the late game.
Therlun
2930
I almost never got the Civ4 AI to trade luxury resources 1:1, the Civ 5 AI has no problem with that as long as you are on good terms. Same with technology, Civ4 AIs were incredibly stingy when it came to fair trades but they forever hated your guts when you refused to give them a tech for free.
Religion is often quoted for block building, because that’s what Civ needed, more reasons for the AI to hate you :P. With seven religions and the spread mechanism the system also defeated itself IMO. Most of the times sharing a religion also meant sharing borders, which is the other thing that causes almost unavoidable war in Civ4. Somewhat exaggerated: neighbouring civs hate you because you are neighbours, far away civs hate you because you have a different religion…
My experiences might be a self-fulfilling thing, but gaining good relations always seemed completely useless to me. Twenty turns later the AI would still declare war on you because of proximity, religion, you being too strong, you being too weak or you not fulfilling one of its random demands.
Enidigm
2931
What’s with the -33% bonus for defending in plains or grassland? Could there be a more poorly though out combat system?
Razgon
2932
Yes - Be happy its not using elementals system.
Tony_M
2933
That did strike me as strange when I was reading the manual. Why not just make all attacks 33% more effective across the board, then give bigger bonuses for hills etc? That seems more intuitive.
Does the game have the option of “Terran” style maps? They were my favourite in Civ 4 (All major civs in the Old World+some minor, long sea journey to smalller new world with just minor civs)
MikeJ
2934
The fact that they have such a non-traditional defense penalty indicates to me that that thought about it quite a bit.
It might be a way to force you to maneuver and to counteract some of defensive capabilities of cities. It also creates a starker trade-off between fast movement and safety (like column versus line).
Enidigm
2935
I understand the concept behind it but it doesn’t work that way in “Real Life”. What it means is that the Player gets, in essence, a 33% bonus in combat vs. the AI. Because combat is not simultaneous and the damage inflicted either kills outright or greatly reduces the unit attacked, this is an enormous “first strike” advantage.
I think what they had in mind is that if your “column” were “caught on the move” in plains or grassland, you would be forced to stop and Defend (gaining a defensive bonus). This is a nice and tidy idea were Civ V primarily a multiplayer game, but vs. an AI which is, at best, indecisive in battle, and at worst, completely scatterbrained, it just means that the only time this affects the player is if you get surprised by a unit out of LOS moving in to attack unexpectedly.
In practice, this just contributes to the ease of killing the AI in battle after battle. It’s basically a 33% penalty vs. the AI.
Enidigm
2936
I have to say this about Civ V: while we’re upset that it seems to have been built by a different team than that which made Civ IV whom ignored, forgot, or failed to study, so many of the important game aspects taken for granted in it’s predecessor, it’s really Civ Rev that seems to have had the greatest impact on the Civ series. I’m not sure what the relative sales numbers were between the two, but those thinking that Civ Rev was simply a “fork” in the development of Civ, just a bastardized version made for consoles, have been proven quite wrong in Civ 5.
Not sure if I’m playing solely for achievements, but with the culture being a new focus, I went again for the cultural victory yesterday with Gandhi, trying to maintain a 3-city limit for the achievement. I set random map size, random map type, Prince level difficulty.
I was lucky this time (unlike my first game) in that I was able to get situated on a good sized island, alone. I got three cities out, all coastal and adjoining rivers, and just set them for maximum culture and population growth. I sent out a warrior as soon as I could to start exploring the world, and through good luck in ruins, was able to get him to a strength 36 military and cleaned up barbarian encampments along the way. At that point, Washington started war with me because I refused open borders, around the same time my culture completely covered the island.
I sent my lone military army into America’s vast territories and razed one of his cities and plowed through any chance of resistance (hurray for alien technology). My downfall was having him embark out and running into a tireme.
Despite that, I threw up walls in my cities and with a war elephant or two, was able to keep Washington at bay on my own land. The one thing I noticed though, is that the culture comes about very slowly, so much so that I lost my first game because I simply ran out of time. Fortunately this time, I was able to get my last culture spot filled by 2036, and by focusing Delhi on production specialists, and having the coffers to back up the impending money loss, I was able to finish the Utopia project by 2049, with exactly one turn to spare.
Culture wins, unless I flat out suck, are going to be very hard to achieve. Perhaps staying at one city may have been wiser, but it seems unpractical for matters of defense and research overall. Getting the one wonder that reduces policy advances by 25% was critical and I should have gotten that sooner. The same applies for the policy advance that discounts other policy advances. You need that as soon as you can too. Maybe my lack of significant trading hurt my culture, I had no trade routes with other city-states as they wanted me often to kill stuff that I had no intent of killing.
That’s a silly way to look at it. The fact that the AI sucks at the tactical combat has nothing to do with the open terrain penalty being good or bad as a design principle. The AI is the problem, not the combat system.
Spock
2939
I don’t see why the defense penalty helps only us versus the AI. It helps the AI versus us as well, no? We all play by the same rules, do we not? The problem isn’t the terrain rules – the problem is the weak tactical AI. But that problem is hardly new to Civ 5. No Civ has had great tactical AI, even after patches and expansions. One can compensate for this by playing on higher difficulties or by refraining from warmongering and trying to beat the AI at the economic/cultural/diplomatic game.
I didn’t love Civ Rev either, but I hardly see it as a “fork in the road” leading from the utopia of Civ 4 to disaster for all things Civ from here out. Civ 4 was a great game, but I didn’t love everything about it, especially not at release. Civ 5 has kept me engrossed for a week of almost constant play (when I’m not working, heh). Sure, some things have been omitted from Civ 4, but just as many new features have been added. I wouldn’t mind if religion, intel, or health made a comeback in a Civ 5 expansion, but in the meantime I’ve got new features that I like even more: city-states, social policies, hexes, one-unit-per-tile. I especially like city-states. For the first time ever in a Civ game, I feel like I can make an alliance and really count on my ally to deliver.
No, and in fact I don’t even know what the “Frankenstein” group was… I’m as puzzled as anyone why end-of-game graphs and replays aren’t in Civ5. As people have already discovered, game replays are saved to your save game folder when you finish a game – there just doesn’t seem to be a way to actually replay them!
